A Theoretical Agenda for Economic Sociology

Economic sociology is no longer a novelty. Born in the late 19th century and reborn in the 1970s, it has produced a long run of exciting studies and promising leads. As the century turns, it is timely to look beyond our accumulation of important empirical studies and reassess what theoretical agenda a structural economic sociology might pursue, and where this agenda fits with the main concerns of sociology and economics.

In doing so, we should keep in mind that the production and distribution of goods and services is just one institutional complex of activities, and that the arguments appropriate to them should have some generic similarity to arguments we might develop to explain political action, science and knowledge, family and kinship, and other persistent social patterns. Thinking about how the sociology of the economy is similar to and different from that of other institutions helps us see what kinds of arguments will work best.